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Participant
March 18, 2021
Question

HD reformatted, no access to photos in Lightroom

  • March 18, 2021
  • 2 replies
  • 143 views

My external hard drive had to be reformatted. Now, when I go into lightroom, my folders and sub folders have a "?" beside them.

How can i locate the location of the photos to have access to them again?

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    2 replies

    Jim Wilde
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    March 18, 2021
    quote

    My external hard drive had to be reformatted. Now, when I go into lightroom, my folders and sub folders have a "?" beside them.

    How can i locate the location of the photos to have access to them again?


    By @Carrie5ED3

     

    Presumably, therefore, your images were on the external hard drive that was reformatted, in which case the images are no longer there (the "?" on the folder and sub-folders means that Lightroom can no longer find them). So they have to be restored from a backup, assuming you do have a backup? Do you have a backup, and if so where is it?

    LinSims
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    March 18, 2021

    Generally speaking, if you're going to reformat a hard drive you want to back-up all your files to an external location (external hard drive, Dropbox, Creative Cloud, that sort of thing) so that you can retrieve them later.

     

    Assuming you did that and then retrieved them after the reformat but still can't locate them using Lightroom, I'm going to move this to the Lightroom forum in the hopes someone there can help you.

     

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